Thursday 2 – June 7th – Day Four

Woke up this morning at 6 am with two things on my mind: The play we saw yesterday and the discussion I had with Mark about directing styles.

First, the play from yesterday. Roy Thinnes called it pornographic even though he really liked it. The young, opinionated director in our group hated it (not surprising – she hates anything she didn’t do) plus two others were greatly offended by it. One young woman said she was surprised at how puritanical she was. Looking back on it, was I offended? Mildly. I was taken in by the drama of the play and the high quality of the music. Do I think it was pornographic? No. But if they cast it with young kids (12 to 13 years old) rather that the 20+ year old actors they used, it would be. It would have been if there was any nudity, but there wasn’t. I do think they were far too graphic with the sex scenes but they didn’t rise to pornography.

What was the play about? The sexual pressures on 12 year old kids from advertising, from TV and movies, from their parents as they grow up. We saw a 12 year old girl become a prostitute. A 12 year old boy think he was gay and kill himself, a 12 year old boy rape a girl on a date and kill himself – all graphically represented on stage.

BUT the important thing was that this play moved us. No one was neutral about it. We are still talking about it today.

I may have been offended but I will look at the world differently now. Isn’t that what great theater is all about?

One more thought: As I said last night, the purpose of these plays is not to present new plays but to test a hypothesis: Will having the playwright direct the play make it possible to present a better product (play) in a short period of time?

If they had selected some Neil Simon type of play, the playwrights as directors wouldn’t have to face the hard issues of working with actors in these hard scenes.

Issue number 2: My discussion with Mark yesterday confirms what I thought about my directing style when I got here: I need to work with some other off island instructors to see how they work.
Whatever directing skills I possess were learned from other directors (mostly local), reading books and the school of hard knocks. I need to find a director to work with or just observe it is done in the professional theater.

As I have said before, I spend very little time at the table going over the script while most directors spend a lot of up front time at the table. I could prepare the entire play before the first rehearsal – I have a good idea what I want out of each scene and how I plan to achieve it – but I don’t prepare to the extent that I could go page by page through the script and spend 30 to 40 hours doing it. The advantage that I see to my current method is that I can make adjustments as I see them without throwing away a lot of work.

Here’s an interesting tidbit:

The copper and silver bracelet I wear is shiny when I wear it at home. When I got to NYC it started to tarnish until it looked like it was a million years old. In the past three days it has become shiny again. Wonder why????

Another interesting tidbit: The subways are a study in acoustics. When you first hear the train coming all you hear are the very lowest frequency sounds. Since they spread out so rapidly, you have no idea which direction the train is coming from. As it get closer there are more and more higher frequency components which let you determine which direction it is coming from.

It’s 11:30 and I’m tired.

Have to finish this tomorrow.